Military-Style Boot Camps for Youth Offenders — A flagship promise meets a troubled pilot

The Policy: National Government Youth Justice Policy — March 2024 →

National campaigned in 2023 on a $25 million-per-year policy to create Young Offender Military Academies run jointly by the Ministry of Justice and the New Zealand Defence Force. Targeting serious repeat offenders aged 15–17, the academies would combine a residential military-style programme with schooling, counselling, drug and alcohol treatment, mentoring, and cultural support. After winning the election and forming a coalition government, National moved quickly — Children's Minister Karen Chhour confirmed a pilot would launch by mid-2024.

What the policy does:

• Creates a new Young Serious Offender (YSO) declaration for 14–17 year olds who have committed at least two offences carrying a maximum sentence of 10 or more years imprisonment, with previous interventions having failed.
• Sentences qualifying youth to a Military-Style Academy (MSA) order: three to twelve months in a youth justice residence followed by a supervised community transition phase.
• The pilot ran from July 2024 to July 2025 at a Palmerston North youth justice residence, enrolling 10 young men. The residential phase ran for three months; the community phase for nine months.
• The Oranga Tamariki (Responding to Serious Youth Offending) Amendment Bill, introduced to Parliament in November 2024, seeks to embed the MSA order as a formal sentencing option in law. A second pilot is confirmed to begin 9 March 2026.

Where things stand:

The pilot's results have been deeply troubling for the government's case. Of the ten original participants, seven reoffended by August 2025 — a 70 percent reoffending rate. One participant died in a vehicle crash near Tirau on State Highway 1 in late November 2024. Another absconded from compassionate bail granted to attend the funeral and remained unlisted weeks later. A third was removed from the programme and transferred to adult corrections custody after reappearing in court just five weeks after graduating. The independent evaluation, published November 2025, found the design phase was rushed, clinical staffing was "unsustainable," te reo Maori and tikanga integration was minimal despite all participants being Maori, and whānau engagement was inadequate. It did note zero physical fights during the residential phase and some progress in NCEA credits.

The evidence base globally and in New Zealand has consistently found that military-style boot camps do not reduce reoffending. New Zealand tried a similar programme in the early 2010s (Military-style Activity Camps, or MACs) — 35 of 42 participants in the first intake reoffended. Chief Science Advisor Sir Peter Gluckman concluded in 2011 that they did not work. Four Victoria University forensic psychologists published in June 2024 that the psychological evidence "never went away": boot camps have no positive impact on attitudes linked to reoffending and may strengthen harmful ones. What works is therapeutic, trauma-informed, community-supported intervention — not the military structure itself.

Opposition is strong and broad. Labour's Willow-Jean Prime called the legislation "tougher, more punitive, lacking evidence," noting it contradicts the government's own officials' advice and the Abuse in Care Royal Commission recommendations. The Greens' Ricardo Menendez March called it "an ideological project with no evidential basis." Te Pati Maori co-leader Rawiri Waititi linked boot camps directly to gang formation, citing historic borstals and boys' homes. Even Children's Commissioner Dr Claire Achmad occupies a nuanced position: she supports not giving up on the young people in the pilot, but explicitly opposes embedding military-style academies in legislation, saying the evidence clearly favours trauma-informed, rehabilitative, wraparound approaches and "we simply shouldn't be including anything that is military-based in youth justice."

What to watch:

• Whether the Amendment Bill passes its remaining parliamentary stages — the Children's Commissioner and the Law Society are both urging it be dropped.
• The second MSA programme (from 9 March 2026) runs four months residential and eight months community — a modified design intended to address the first pilot's weaknesses; its evaluation will be politically pivotal.
• The 2025 Budget allocated $33 million for boot camp establishment and a further $16 million for the YSO category — this spending will face scrutiny against mounting evidence of ineffectiveness.